A Collector’s Personal Perspective

Before he became obsessed with Picasso and Braque, there were Clark Gable and Claudette Colbert. Back in elementary school, Leonard A. Lauder, the 81-year-old philanthropist and cosmetics tycoon, used to go to the movies at the Museum of Modern Art several times a week. Sometimes he would hang out in the galleries, too, soaking up the art. “I didn’t discover Cubism then,” he said. “But just by looking, you learn what’s good.”

Decades later, in 1976, on one of his regular visits to Sotheby’s, Mr. Lauder happened upon a Cubist drawing by Léger that he ended up buying. “Then I found another,” he said. Soon he became completely immersed in everything Cubist, attending lectures and visiting museum collections here and abroad. And for nearly 40 years, he has diligently amassed what is considered one of the world’s greatest collections of Cubist art, rivaling those of the Museum of Modern Art in New York, the Pompidou Center in Paris and the State Hermitage Museum in St. Petersburg, Russia. Now worth more than $1 billion, it includes 81 paintings, drawings and sculptures by just four artists: Picasso, Braque, Léger and Gris. Last year, he promised the collection to the Met, making it one of the largest gifts in the museum’s history. Starting Oct. 20, it will be exhibited there as a whole for the first time in a show organized by Emily Braun, an art historian and Mr. Lauder’s curator for 27 years, and Rebecca Rabinow, a curator in the Met’s department of modern and contemporary art.

Chronicling the evolution of Cubism, which began in the early years of the 20th century (the term appeared in a review of a 1908 exhibition at Daniel-Henry Kahnweiler’s Paris gallery), the show illustrates how these artists radically took apart traditional perspective, blended high and low culture and reimagined conventional compositions.

Mr. Lauder said that “nobody wanted” Cubist art for the first 20 years he collected it, so it was still affordable. He recalled standing in Christie’s one afternoon when it was selling some Cubist paintings, and a group of collectors came in and walked right by them. “They weren’t interested,” he said.

Early on, he knew that one day he would donate the collection to a museum. “Before buying something, the question I always ask myself is this: If it were going to a museum, would it make the cut?” he said on a recent afternoon in the wood-paneled library of his New York apartment, where several Cubist paintings still hung, the last of the collection yet to be packed off for the Met. “By which I meant: Would it stay on display, like van Gogh’s ‘Starry Night’ ” at MoMA or the ‘Winged Victory’ at the Louvre? If the answer is yes, then that’s what I buy.”

As he strove to “tell the story of Cubism” through a comprehensive collection, he experienced many adventures and years of waiting and of rejection — sometimes more than a decade — to pry a key work from a collector. “It’s not the possession of the picture, it is the search and the hunt,” Mr. Lauder said.

The exhibition will also reveal some of the surprising images he saw while examining the back of a work, like an abandoned portrait of a woman on the flip side of Gris’s “Houses in Paris, Place Ravignan.”

“This isn’t the end,” Mr. Lauder said emphatically, growing animated as he discussed many of his favorite works. “I’ve bought three things for the Met since the deal was signed. And I intend to keep on adding to it. My ambition is to double the size. It won’t be so easy. Or cheap.” Here, he and Ms. Braun tell the stories behind four works in the collection.

In February, when this painting sold at Christie’s in London for $56.7 million, the buyer, bidding by telephone, was a mystery and has remained a mystery until now.

Proving that his is a “living collection,” Mr. Lauder continues to be on the prowl for great Cubist works. This 1915 canvas captures a crucial moment between collage and Gris’s later, more classical style. It depicts objects like grapes, a newspaper and a bottle of red wine on a table. But viewers looking closely will also see the face of a bull, one eye formed by black-and-white concentric circles, a snout emerging from a teacup and saucer, a nostril delineated by the cup’s handle.

“Mr. Lauder had to buy it,” Ms. Braun said. “It is one of Gris’s most important paintings and the culmination of the artist’s Cubist moment.” Mr. Lauder’s collection, she explained, already includes six of Gris’s collages, an extraordinary number to be found in any one collection. It also fills a gap, because he had no paintings by Gris from that year, a turbulent time as a result of the war.

Wanting to snag the best before anyone else has meant making frequent trips to bank vaults in Switzerland, where many major collections are secreted away. In 2002, Mr. Lauder flew to Basel to see this 1912 painting from the collection of Raoul La Roche, the Swiss-born banker. After walking through a seemingly endless series of doors and corridors he came to the vault where “Violin: ‘Mozart Kubelick’ “ was casually placed against a wall. This canvas represented a moment when color was introduced into the monochromatic scheme of Analytical Cubism.

“What made this picture so important to me personally is that I’m a postcard collector, and I put together a complete collection of postcards they did for the 1913 Armory Show,” Mr. Lauder explained, referring to the landmark exhibition that introduced European avant-garde styles, including Cubism, to the American public. “And I had the postcard of this painting,” above left. “That was good enough provenance for me.”

‘Composition (The Typographer)'

(1918-19), by Fernand Léger; oil on canvas

Image

"Composition (The Typographer)" (1918-19), by Fernand Léger.CreditPromised Gift from the Leonard A. Lauder Cubist Collection/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York and ADAGP, Paris

Whenever a dealer has a Cubist work to sell, Mr. Lauder is generally the first stop. Even so, not everything in this collection has dropped in his lap. This painting, for example, was in his sights for more than a decade. “I chased this painting for years,” he recalled. It had belonged to Harold Diamond, a dealer who died in 1982. His wife, Hester, inherited the painting, and when Mr. Lauder heard she was trying to sell it, in the late 1980s, he went to see her. “But it was too late,” Mr. Lauder recalled. She had already sold it to Jacques Koerfer, a German-born collector who was a chairman of BMW. Mr. Lauder then tried to buy it from Koerfer, but he refused to part with it. When Koerfer died, in 1991, Mr. Lauder tried again, appealing to Koerfer’s son, who put this and other works from his father’s collection up for sale at a Christie’s auction in 1998, where Mr. Lauder bought it for $6 million.

But before he bid, Mr. Lauder was worried that the canvas — which measures about 8 feet by 6 feet — wouldn’t fit into his apartment. “Christie’s made a full-sized reproduction of it, in two pieces, and we tried it on the wall,” Mr. Lauder recalled. “It looked magnificent.”

Getting it into his apartment was no small feat. It involved removing a window, placing the painting in a crate and hauling it up the side of the building by crane.

"Student With A Newspaper" (1913-1914), by Pablo Picasso.CreditPromised Gift from the Leonard A. Lauder Cubist Collection/Estate of Pablo Picasso, Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York

By 2002, the year Mr. Lauder bought this painting, competition among collectors for key Picassos had intensified. Being able to go straight to the source could make all the difference. The heirs of the Swiss-born banker Raoul La Roche owned this late 1913-early 1914 painting, which Mr. Lauder saw when it was tucked away in a bank vault in Basel. “It incorporates everything you want in a Cubist painting,” Ms. Braun said. “It’s the most important example of this new type of Synthetic Cubism, with the colorful stippled brushwork that is an allusion to French Neo-Impressionist painting and to the street culture of confetti that was all the fad in Paris at the time.” It also records the moment when Picasso was returning to painting after collage. Here he plays with various textures, including sand blended with paint. “There is also the typical Cubist wordplay,” Ms. Braun said. “Here is the inebriated student who’s reading the paper, and Picasso spells out ‘urnal,’ which is a pun on the word ‘journal’ and ‘urinal.’ “

A version of this article appears in print on , on Page AR1 of the New York edition with the headline: A Collector’s Personal Perspective. Order Reprints | Today’s Paper | Subscribe